“Halt!” said Alan at last, when she had done everything except imitate the mule.

“The road continues,” said the demon-driver seductively.

“Yes, but they will hear you if you go on.  Stop and wait.  We’ve a mountain battery to look at.”

They were not at work for the moment, and the Commandant, a grim and forceful man, showed me some details of their construction.  When we left them in their bower—­it looked like a Hill priest’s wayside shrine—­we heard them singing through the steep-descending pines.  They, too, like the 75’s, seem to have no pet name in the service.

It was a poisonously blind country.  The woods blocked all sense of direction above and around.  The ground was at any angle you please, and all sounds were split up and muddled by the tree-trunks, which acted as silencers.  High above us the respectable, all-concealing forest had turned into sparse, ghastly blue sticks of timber—­an assembly of leper-trees round a bald mountain top.  “That’s where we’re going,” said Alan.  “Isn’t it an adorable country?”

TRENCHES

A machine-gun loosed a few shots in the fumbling style of her kind when they feel for an opening.  A couple of rifle shots answered.  They might have been half a mile away or a hundred yards below.  An adorable country!  We climbed up till we found once again a complete tea-garden of little sunk houses, almost invisible in the brown-pink recesses of the thick forest.  Here the trenches began, and with them for the next few hours life in two dimensions—­length and breadth.  You could have eaten your dinner almost anywhere off the swept dry ground, for the steep slopes favoured draining, there was no lack of timber, and there was unlimited labour.  It had made neat double-length dug-outs where the wounded could be laid in during their passage down the mountain side; well-tended occasional latrines properly limed; dug-outs for sleeping and eating; overhead protections and tool-sheds where needed, and, as one came nearer the working face, very clever cellars against trench-sweepers.  Men passed on their business; a squad with a captured machine-gun which they tested in a sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition; long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown sunless walls.  One understood after a while the nightmare that lays hold of trench-stale men, when the dreamer wanders for ever in those blind mazes till, after centuries of agonizing flight, he finds himself stumbling out again into the white blaze and horror of the mined front—­he who thought he had almost reached home!

IN THE FRONT LINE

There were no trees above us now.  Their trunks lay along the edge of the trench, built in with stones, where necessary, or sometimes overhanging it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.  Bits of cloth, not French, showed, too, in the uneven lines of debris at the trench lip, and some thoughtful soul had marked an unexploded Boche trench-sweeper as “not to be touched.”  It was a young lawyer from Paris who pointed that out to me.